Oh, Deborah

You may smack me in the head and say “stop repeating yourself!” when I tell you my favorite place in New York to go a’wandering for dinner is the West Village. Specifically: Bleecker and Carmine. But you know that. I won’t bore you.

So the other night we were a’wandering on Bleecker and we turned on Carmine. I saw the sign for “Deborah” and I thought to myself, “Hmmm, Deborah, I haven’t been HERE yet.”

Of course, there were blurbs and articles on the door so I knew I was in good hands. [See Via Emilia post for further explanation.] We were quickly seated near the front and a boisterous high-energy waitress began to recite all the menu changes and specials for the night. [OH MY GOD if you haven’t read this Larry Doyle New Yorker piece do so now. It’s hilarious.] She went on for a looong time and I finally asked how she memorized all that. “I ate everything I just described,” she joked, “so it’s easy to remember.”

I liked her.

The menu at Deborah is exciting with weird mixes of ingredients and a nice mix of the bizarre and the comfortably familiar. My companion and I decided to share a beet salad to start:

This may surpass the Balthazar beet salad as my favorite beet salad of all time. The beets are warm, they’re served with spinach and lots of secret hidden flavor bursts like walnuts, tangerine slices and bleu cheese. I greedily ate more than my half. And I’m not apologizing.

I loved every bite. That red sauce at the side was “very hot,” said our waitress. I’m not sure why it was there but I enjoyed nervously dipping tiny corners of my halibut in it to see how hot it was. I think it was pretty hot.

So you know how our waitress was all over-the-top with her big personality? My dinner companion and I had a theory.

“I think she’s Deborah,” said my dinner companion who will now be known as Matthew K. Johnson.

“Oh ya?” I said. I supported this theory.

So when she came to clear our plates I popped the question. “Are you Deborah?”

She smiled. “No, no–Deborah’s the spiky blonde in the kitchen.” We looked. There she was.